Development Through Cooperation Campaign (Zemecha)
협동을 통한 발전 운동(제메차)
A mass mobilisation launched by Ethiopia's Derg (Provisional Military Administrative Council) from late 1974 to carry the Ethiopian Revolution into the countryside. Roughly 60,000 students, teachers and other personnel were sent to about 430 rural localities to run literacy instruction, lay foundations for modern education and healthcare, and replace feudal and gerontocratic structures with peasant and urban dwellers' associations. Stated purposes were to promote land reform, improve agricultural production, health and local administration, and teach peasants the new political and social order. Participation was compulsory and was made mandatory in 1975 for secondary students from grade ten upward, university students and teachers.
In depth
Background
By 1973 the adult illiteracy rate in Ethiopia was about 93 percent, and the 1974 revolution's National Democratic Revolution programme pledged free education and measures to eliminate illiteracy. The Derg, meanwhile, faced a political challenge from university and secondary school students, among its most vocal critics. Dispatching them to remote rural areas was widely seen, including by many participants, as removing organised student opposition from urban centres and consolidating the Derg's hold on power.
Organisation and scale
A 1975 proclamation made participation mandatory for all secondary students from grade ten upward, university students and teachers. Roughly 60,000 were drafted and deployed to about 430 rural localities excluding Eritrea, wearing uniforms and organised in a manner the Encyclopaedia Aethiopica says "in many ways resembled a broad military operation." By early 1975 the government had closed Haile Selassie I University and all senior secondary schools in order to deploy some 60,000 students and teachers to the countryside. After the March 4, 1975 nationalisation of rural land, up to 60,000 students were dispatched in a zemacha to mobilise the peasantry and organise peasant associations under the 1975 Land Reform Proclamation.
Units led by a military officer and an academic supervisor ran literacy classes, shared agricultural and health knowledge, helped with farm labour and implemented land reform proclamations locally. Base-camp committees handled food, political education and logistics, while Study Clubs read and debated Marxist, Leninist and Maoist texts alongside Ethiopian leftist pamphlets.
Conflict and control
Participation was compulsory and refusal punishable, and those who had not completed their service were initially barred by law from returning to school or formal employment. Zemachoch (participants) clashed with local authorities in many localities; in some areas they exceeded their mandate by confiscating grain stores and weapons from landowners, prompting confrontations with local police, while agitation for actual implementation of land reform produced demonstrations, strikes and the jailing of participants. MERIP records that students sent to mobilise the peasantry soon clashed with the police and administrators already there, that landlords killed some zemacha cadres, and that the PMAC became wary of this agitational force outside its control. The December 1975 Peasant Association Decree was designed to create a more permanent rural mobilising structure.
Literacy results
Of 756,200 persons registered for the campaign's literacy programme, 158,065 completed the full course and a further 202,692 were still learning by summer 1976; the rest did not complete.
Period and legacy
The dating is contested. One source dates the Derg's launch to December 1974; another places the closure of the university and senior schools and the deployment of 60,000 in early 1975; a third places the dispatch after the March 4, 1975 rural land nationalisation. The mandatory participation proclamation is dated to 1975. On the end point, one source gives the campaign's formal abandonment in July 1976, while MERIP states that by the end of 1975 the government had recalled most of the students to the cities. This may be a difference between partial recall and formal termination, so the accounts are not collapsed into one date. The campaign fell far short of its planned four-year duration.
The Zämäča directly shaped the more extensive Ethiopian National Literacy Campaign of July 1979 to 1991, which used 15 languages, reached over 18 million registered participants and raised the national literacy rate from 7 percent in 1973 to 62.4 percent by 1986, winning the UNESCO International Reading Association Literacy Prize.
Memory is contested. Participants describe the Zemecha simultaneously as a genuine attempt to serve rural communities and as a politically coercive instrument of the Derg, with some noting its ideological framework limited rather than advanced critical thinking among Ethiopian youth.